


strange aeons

by bestworstcase (windrattlestheblinds)



Category: Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, caveat emptor if you're squeamish., potentially disturbing imagery?, there’s an animal corpse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-25 17:48:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20916089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windrattlestheblinds/pseuds/bestworstcase
Summary: One by one, the pupils of Lord Demanitus fall.





	strange aeons

**Author's Note:**

> _written for week one of [tangledtober.](https://tangledadventures.tumblr.com/post/187868749868/) prompt: monster bash / villain swap._

i.

The house of Lord Demanitus crouched on the blunt summit of Mount Ghisa, where the precarious climb and bitter wind guaranteed its isolation from all but the most dedicated of callers. It had been constructed during his grandfather’s youth out of dark granite quarried from the mountain itself, by an architect with little eye for beauty: it was an ungainly, rambling, lopsided thing. From a distance it gave the impression of some malformed behemoth brooding in the snow.

Some decades ago its entrance hall had collapsed and vanished beneath encroaching drifts. Young Demanitus, being too absorbed in his research at the time to dig it out again, had outfitted an automaton with a sturdy drill and set it to burrowing down from a dusty storeroom to a little cave a hundred or so feet beneath the house. Anyone hoping to enter now had to first scale this dingy shaft by means of one hundred and sixty-two footholds chipped into its otherwise sheer walls.

Four people lived in the house of Lord Demanitus, and not once had it occurred to any of them that this business with the long dark climb into the storeroom was a greater inconvenience than the effort of reviving the original entrance; that’s magicians for you.

* * *

ii.

Sugracha il Pchela was a witch, as all her foremothers had been, but in her chest beat the heart of an artist. She sketched endlessly, and though she had some skill with oils and canvas she had never produced a painting which satisfied her. She suffered the crystalline revulsion endemic to artists, for each piece made an insipid mockery of the exquisite compositions trapped in her imagination, and she detested them all.

One chill morning, Sugracha gathered her paints and clambered down from the house with an easel and fresh canvas strapped to her back. Weeks ago she had discovered a precipitous ledge overlooking a startling pocket of vegetation, sheltered from the wind and snow by sheer cliffs and warmed by a burbling hot spring. The splash of green amid the black and white of the mountain charmed her, and she had become determined to descend into the heart of the grove and capture it in paint.

It was a hike of an hour to reach the ledge, and another hour to feel her way down from there. Once she reached the bottom, Sugracha peeled away her heavy furs and mopped her brow, for the heat trapped within the little grove was stultifying and swampy; still, after a moment’s rest she hefted her pack and pressed on undeterred.

A sulfuric tang thickened the air, nearly palpable as Sugracha drew nearer to the spring. Wreathes of noxious steam swirled among the trees, which were of a gnarled and hardy type she had never encountered before, with luminous green leaves and black thorns longer than her thumb. A soft greenish light sighed out of them like mist.

As she walked she became aware of a sticky sweet scent underlying the sulfur; the scent of rot. Following it led her to the water’s edge, where the corpse of a great ram lay decomposing in the heat.

It had been dead for some time. Tufts of fur, some white, some matted and rusty with blood, floated over the grass and the hissing water as though the animal were dissolving slowly into the marshy ground; its flesh split open along the ribs, which had been picked clean of meat and shone greasily in the misty light. The skull rested at an awkward angle to the body, and the skin had fallen away from the jawbone to expose the teeth in a rictus of a grin. From its crown grew two great curling horns, black as mountain stone and majestic even in death.

Struck by the gruesome beauty of it all, Sugracha stood up her easel at once and prepared her canvas with hasty, trembling hands. Her heart beat a frantic tattoo; inspiration buzzed like carrion flies in her mind.

She painted.

* * *

iii.

Before she had come to Mount Ghisa to pursue what crumbs of knowledge Lord Demanitus deigned to share, Calanthe Gothel had been the daughter of one of the more desperate and destitute high houses of Aberdinon. As a child she had demonstrated some innate skill for the art of potionry, and her father had secured for her a private tutor whose ordinary fees were well beyond the family’s means.

Calanthe had never questioned this as a child, but on the cusp of her adulthood her father had taken her aside and explained that her education had been bought with ruinous loans. Thus he had commanded her to brew a powerful love potion and administer it to a wealthy nobleman of her choosing—or even a common merchant, he had added with an air of great generosity, so long as he was rich!—so she might marry into fortune and release her family from the shackles of debt.

She had smiled a brittle smile and retreated to her cauldron. Her father had retired to bed that night aglow with pride in the unprotesting obedience of his daughter.

He hadn’t lived to see the dawn.

Lord Demanitus knew nothing of this, of course. Calanthe had taken a new name and spun him a tragic tale of mother and father lost to the plague that had swept the continent that year, and he had welcomed her into his tutelage as he would never welcome a murderer.

Still, Calanthe could not help but dwell on it; even as the poison had simmered and she had packed her meager possessions for her escape from Aberdinon, she had not dared contemplate her decision, and once it was over she retrod the memory so often that it now felt distant and strange, like a story she read as a child and half-forgot.

(She loved her father.)

She thought of this on the day Sugracha sowed the seeds of their destruction, for on that day there was a hollowness to her malachite-green eyes that had not been there before, and it reminded Calanthe of how her father had looked when his death throes faded to stillness.

* * *

iv.

At the center of the house was a large circular chamber with a ceiling of glass. Networks of copper piping lined the walls and pumped in steam with rhythmic little gasps. Long planters crowded the space, a claustrophobic maze of a vegetable garden; when Sugracha returned from the grove, she found Calanthe there, crooning nonsense to the rampion as she flitted her fingers over its ruffled leaves. Soil clung to the tatty blue dress she reserved for garden work; her dark hair frizzed magnificently in the artificial humidity.

Calanthe had remarkable eyes, colorless and pale as mist, and they sparked with concern when Sugracha whispered her name. She lifted an inquiring eyebrow. “You look a fright,” Calanthe said. “Whatever happened?”

Sugracha could only shake her head, sharp twitchy little motions; agitation strangled her voice until Calanthe took her face between her hands. Her slender fingertips traced the curve of Sugracha’s jaw as she tipped her chin up, and as their gazes met Sugracha felt her throat unstick.

“You’re all clammy,” Calanthe added, frowning.

Gulping air, Sugracha gasped, “I went out to paint—”

To paint! Hours in the sticky heat of that unnatural grove, until the golden sun had slipped behind the mountain and the eerie glow of the trees burned like green fire, until her fingers cramped and her head swam with exhaustion and thirst; _how _Sugracha had managed the climb back to the house, she would never know—but the painting! The _painting!_

A wail of laughter rattled the air; only when she choked on it did Sugracha realize it had come from her. Coughing, spluttering, she clamped a hand over her mouth. Her vision blurred as Calanthe guided her to the steps leading out of the greenhouse and pressed her to sit.

“…that is…” Sugracha mumbled through her fingers once she caught her breath. Her cheeks felt wet; she was crying. “I made something beautiful, Calanthe. I made something beautiful _at last._”

* * *

v.

In the night a snowstorm beat its icy fists against the walls of the house, and the screaming wind kept Sugracha from restful sleep. She dreamed fitfully of a putrid wraith with the head of a ram; it danced in the an emerald glade, shrieking and wailing and wreathed in the toxic smoke of a sulfuric fire. When she jolted awake her head throbbed with the thunder of a drum, as if the heartbeat of the earth had crawled inside her skull. She tumbled out of bed and, still draped in her sweat-soaked sheets, tore through her paints.

Green, yellow. Black.

She did not bother with easel or light; as the shadows swirled and the dream rang like a gong in her head, she crouched over a fresh canvas and painted frantically in the darkness.

* * *

vi.

Little love was lost between Calanthe and Tromus Matthiaos, the eldest and most favored of Lord Demanitus’ inner circle. Calanthe thought him spoilt, a pompous scholar who would not last a day apart from his books; he detested her vanity and the insolence she retreated into when Lord Demanitus declined to answer questions to her perfect satisfaction. 

Thus when Calanthe marched into his study and declared that he would join her for a hike that afternoon, Matthiaos chuckled and replied, “So you can push me off a cliff and claim that I fell? Oh, oh, je ne pouvais pas le sauver!—oh, so _sad._” He simpered. “_Non. _I will stay here.”

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself,” Calanthe scoffed. “I need your… help.”

She spoke the word as if it tasted bitter, and Matthiaos quirked an eyebrow, intrigued in spite of himself. “With what, hmm?”

“With Sugracha,” she said, and promised to explain on the way.

By then a month had passed since Sugracha’s return from the grove, and chilly spring had faded into dry summer; the sun rode high in a cloudless sky when Calanthe and Matthiaos emerged, blinking, from the shadowy cave beneath the house, and the mountain air felt brisk and clean. They made good time, following the map Calanthe had persuaded Sugracha to draw for them, and soon found the ragged ledge from which Sugracha had descended into her grove.

Each peered over the ledge while keeping half an eye on the other. The drop plunged into a seething sea of inky shadows, which slopped wetly against the granite cliffs. Nothing green, nothing of life could survive in such utter darkness.

“Perhaps we are in the wrong place,” Matthiaos drawled.

“No.” Calanthe smoothed the map flat against the earth; Sugracha had sketched the contours of the ledge, and there could be no mistaking the perfect match between drawing and reality. “This is it.”

She rose and began to prepare an anchor from which they could abseil into the abyss; Matthiaos barked an incredulous laugh. “You cannot be serious.”

“Don’t come if you don’t want to,” Calanthe said, and though her tone was very calm Matthiaos heard the challenge in it.

Gritting his teeth, Matthiaos snapped, “Fine, _d’accord. _But ça me met mal à l’aise...”

His grumbles fell into inaudible mutters as he stamped his feet, glancing into the unnatural darkness again. Calanthe ignored him as she tied off the rope and tested her weight against the strength of the knot; satisfied, she murmured, “Let us go.”

* * *

vii.

In centuries to come Matthiaos would search for the words to describe what he saw during that interminable descent into darkness.

How these shadows were not the mere absence of light but a palpable presence, a living, liquid blackness; how it slithered and slunk over him in oily currents, how it poured down his throat and flooded his lungs when he drew breath and yet he did not (could not) drown; how the rope dissolved between his fingers and all the chains of mortal reality fell away and he saw, as the blackness did, how the world was a frail glint of light adrift on a vast suppurating ocean of _rot;_ and how he laughed, how he screamed, how he wept, how the _knowing_ unbraided his soul and wove it anew, how he died, how he _lived_—

Some tales resist their telling, and in the end Matthiaos would cover his face with his hands and say only this: That he stood on the shores of falsehood and drank a sea of truth, and when he awoke he clutched an opalescent shell whose barbed spines had shredded the hand that held it. That he lay shattered and numb in the deep recesses of that crevice, watching his own blood dribble sluggishly down his wrist until Calanthe found him there and forced a restorative potion down his throat.

She said nothing. He said nothing. Not one word passed between them as they clambered back up into the sunlight, which seemed to Matthiaos grey and much thinner than it had before; silence accompanied them back to the house of Lord Demanitus.

* * *

viii.

Summer fell to the onslaught of fall with a brutal swiftness. Beneath the sedate rhythms of life in the house, Calanthe felt stirrings of an ill wind. All summer Sugracha had complained of disturbing dreams, and as the days waned shorter she became sullen and vague; sometimes she conducted whispered conversations with Matthiaos, whose eyes had been glazed with exhaustion ever since his fall from the ledge, but whenever she drew near they would stop and stare and until she retreated again, simmering with suspicion and jealousy.

On the eve of winter, she awoke from a dead sleep to the press of icy fingers against her cheek as Sugracha whispered her name. She blinked, still half asleep until Sugracha said, “Calanthe, we’re leaving. Matthiaos and I.”

“Leave—? You and—?” It was cold as a tomb in her bedroom, and her thick pile of blankets crushed her into the mattress; with the bonds of sleep still wrapped around her limbs, she lay helpless beneath them. “_Now? _With _him?_ Are you—are you _mad?!”_

Sugracha returned a choking laugh and pressed her forehead against Calanthe’s. Her skin felt cold and clammy, but her breath burned as it eddied in the scant space between them. She gasped, “Maybe. Maybe. I have been dreaming—but oh, Calanthe, don’t fear for me. Our lady keeps us warm.”

“Your— _what?”_

“I can’t tell you,” Sugracha breathed. “You must find her in your own way.”

“Don’t,” Calanthe said, clumsily shoving at the blankets. She groped through the frozen air and found Sugracha’s hands, trembling and thinner than they had been when Calanthe held them last. Sharp knuckles pulled her chilled skin tight. “Don’t _go,_” she pleaded. “These dreams are just _dreams. _Don’t chase them to your death, don’t—don’t _leave _me.”

Sugracha squeezed her hands, gently, tenderly, and replied, “We have to.”

Her fingers slipped free, and Calanthe screamed, “Wait!,” and she was gone.

* * *

ix.

And the meandering halls of the house stood still and silent, and in the gaping chasm inside the storeroom she found nothing but shadows and frost. Calanthe stood quivering on the precipice for a moment while the gelid flagstones sapped warmth from her bare feet; then with a strangled gasp she spun and ran back through the slumbering house.

The door to Sugracha’s quarters hung open on listless hinges, and the gloom within billowed like smoke. It froze in her chest as Calanthe pressed into it, colder than the coldest winter storm; a vicious gale ripped at her robe and tore at her hair, and slivers of frost grew in her eyes and forced her to _see: _

A white ram’s skull leering through the mist, crowned with a pair of gleaming onyx horns and festooned with garlands of nettles and thorns. Flesh clung to the bone in foul tatters, and greenish pus dripped in rivulets from its empty sockets.

Its body poured ever-changing from one canvas to the next, now charcoal fur matted with slime, now ink-dark scales glistening black and blacker, now coils of craggy flesh gnarled like the roots of an ancient tree; shadowy arms spilled onto the walls and became long, lithe hands splayed palm-up over the floorboards.

Ice in her ears, ice in her mouth; the necrotic black of frostbite swallowed her fingers and devoured her arms as her legs buckled and the shadows swelled. Groaning, she sank into a carpet of hoarfrost, and into her mind the cold sang _it is time, it is time, come to us, come to us._

“What are you?” Calanthe coughed. Blood flecked the snow.

_I am death, _the cold sang. _I am life. I have slept too long, and now I rise. _

_Come. Release me._

Swirling symbols scratched into the walls flared green, and the darkness split like skin beneath a knife. Smothering heat welled out of the wound; her frozen flesh thawed and sloughed away and regrew, pale as moonbeams and slick with greenish ooze. Calanthe gasped, scrambling to her feet, and though she meant to flee her legs did not obey.

As the cold sang, so too did the heat: _One to see, _it crooned. _One to know. And one to choose. Free me. Release me. _Choose.

In the sickly light of the sigils, Calanthe could see as she had not before: the chimerical beast of Sugracha’s dreams bubbled and writhed, and its arms stretched wide and its hands reached out. The stench of it was terrible, and its voice was talons and teeth, and the sight of it had filled her mouth with blood; but it was trapped and helpless within the painting.

She could turn away. She could shut and bar the door, and the beast would stay locked inside; perhaps it would sleep again, its energy spent, or perhaps it would howl and rage and pace in its prison until the paint faded and light washed the shadows away.

_Please, _the voice hummed, as if sensing the tenor of her thoughts.

Calanthe found she pitied it.

“Well,” she said raggedly, “since you said please.”

Then she stepped forward and took its hand, and Zhan Tiri rose.


End file.
